Dead Link Sweepers

One of the things which will make for more Relevant Pages by RescuingBrokenLinks DonaldNoyes.ThinkingOutLoud.20110610.20140908

This page can become a place where we can improve the pages found in this wiki by dealing with the Dead(BrokenLink) problem.

This is not exclusively a problem found here, but is present all over the internet. It is a problem because often after a page is created or modified, changes may be made to the link targets found in the page.

It would be a good thing if administration/creation/editors would periodically revisit and revalidate page links.

Sadly, even well maintained and well visited pages and sites suffer from this dysfunction. Those who would have the pages they create, or edit become ReallyValuablePages, should perform this revisitation process and make suitable corrections and adjustments to any link found to be unreachable. Such individuals can known as DeadLinkSweepers.

As a first step, I suggest the addition of a list page "HasBrokenLinks?" be created to point to all pages where a BrokenLink is found and the person making the insertion intends to do something about it at another time. Then as a second suggestion, that the orderly, systematic process of revalidating every page which contains ExternalLinks? and upon which are found links that are dead or broken, and that the links are found to point to information which should be preserved and maintained, as opposed to deleted. The term of sweeping is appropriate because it indicates that something is being tidied up.

An automated mechanism for locating dead links would be very helpful. If the C2 could mark such links with a text marker of some sort [BrokenLink detected] then it would make our job of cleaning up a lot easier. Much better than us chasing every external link on every page. Eh? -- MartySchrader

See: WikiNeedsaDeadLinkSweeper, UnidentifiedBrokenLinksDiscussion

CategoryWikiMaintenance